23-11-2025, 02:10 PM
Linda, although well-intentioned, your post is a jumble of things that distorts my thinking. I believe the Rosettes page is a representation of the medieval cosmos, and I've elaborated on that idea in previous posts.
First, we need to understand how medieval scholars conceived of the universe. For them, it was a set of concentric spheres interconnected with the sphere of fixed stars, completing the whole. What we see in the Rosettes are these spheres drawn in an extended form and their interconnections. The central sphere represents the fixed stars, and the other seven represent the known planets, which included the sun and the moon. The sphere with the castle represents the Earth. It is there that we see a T-O map.
What's in the central sphere aren't towers, but rather luxurious vessels, as I proved with practically identical contemporary images. They are containers that hold essences and are related to those we see in the pharmaceutical section. Some are very similar. The artists most likely intended to suggest that the essences are created by celestial influence.
On the page you linked from Enrique de Villena's astrology treatise, we see a fortress on a T-O map. This indicates the latitude of a particular city, which is why I think the castle we see in the Rosettes refers to the latitude of the location where the Voynich Manuscript was written.
In this treatise we see in the corners of all the cosmological images a strange decoration that coincides with that of the central sphere of the Rosettes and with other cosmological ones from the Voynich. I call them slabs, but we could call them cells, bulbs, or anything else. They have a dot like those in the Voynich Manuscripts. In my opinion, they form part of the iconography of the outermost sphere of the universe, which is something closed and completely covered by stars.
Indeed, there's no source to confirm that, or at least I haven't found one. It's my deduction based on the images. You can agree or not, but I'm trying to explain my reasoning.
First, we need to understand how medieval scholars conceived of the universe. For them, it was a set of concentric spheres interconnected with the sphere of fixed stars, completing the whole. What we see in the Rosettes are these spheres drawn in an extended form and their interconnections. The central sphere represents the fixed stars, and the other seven represent the known planets, which included the sun and the moon. The sphere with the castle represents the Earth. It is there that we see a T-O map.
What's in the central sphere aren't towers, but rather luxurious vessels, as I proved with practically identical contemporary images. They are containers that hold essences and are related to those we see in the pharmaceutical section. Some are very similar. The artists most likely intended to suggest that the essences are created by celestial influence.
On the page you linked from Enrique de Villena's astrology treatise, we see a fortress on a T-O map. This indicates the latitude of a particular city, which is why I think the castle we see in the Rosettes refers to the latitude of the location where the Voynich Manuscript was written.
In this treatise we see in the corners of all the cosmological images a strange decoration that coincides with that of the central sphere of the Rosettes and with other cosmological ones from the Voynich. I call them slabs, but we could call them cells, bulbs, or anything else. They have a dot like those in the Voynich Manuscripts. In my opinion, they form part of the iconography of the outermost sphere of the universe, which is something closed and completely covered by stars.
Indeed, there's no source to confirm that, or at least I haven't found one. It's my deduction based on the images. You can agree or not, but I'm trying to explain my reasoning.